Women and New Labour: Engendering politics and policy?

Description

Although there is a growing body of international literature on the feminisation of politics and the policy process and, as New Labour's term of office progresses, a rapidly growing series of texts around New Labour's politics and policies, until now no one text has conducted an analysis of New Labour's politics and policies from a gendered perspective, despite the fact that New Labour have set themselves up to specifically address women's issues and attract women voters. This book fills that gap in an interesting and timely way. Women and New Labour will be a valuable addition to both feminist and mainstream scholarship in the social sciences, particularly in political science, social policy and economics. Instead of focusing on traditionally feminist areas of politics and policy (such as violent crime against women) the authors opt to focus on three case study areas of mainstream policy (economic policy, foreign policy and welfare policy) from a gendered perspective. The analytical framework provided by the editors yields generalisable insights that will outlast New Labour's third term.

Claire Annesley is a lecturer in European politics and convenor of the Gender Research Network at the University of Manchester. Her research interests focus on the transition of the welfare state in the direction of the Adult Worker Model in the UK, Germany and the European Union. Francesca Gains is a senior lecturer in the School of Social Sciences and senior research fellow at the Institute for Political and Economic Governance (IPEG) at the University of Manchester. She is currently the research co-ordinator for the Evaluating Local Governance research project for the Department of Communities and Local Government. Kirstein Rummery is a senior lecturer in social policy at the University of Manchester. She has research interests in disability, citizenship and access to services, and partnership working and governance in the welfare state.

"This book is an excellent account of the impact of women and gender on Labour Party policy, and is an important contribution to both the new literature on women and policy-making and to the relatively neglected area of how parties make policy. It will become a reading list requirement for courses on party politics, public policy and gender and politics." Joni Lovenduski, School of Politics and Sociology, Birkbeck College